Dull Reflects on His ‘Most Intense Year’

Dick Dull was hired as athletic director at Cal State Northridge in May 1999 and pledged to devote his efforts toward “healing wounds and raising funds.”

Beginning in July, Dull, 54, has been consumed with both tasks. The school has a dismal track record in fund-raising and public relations, with scars remaining from a number of controversial events in recent years.

During the last year, Northridge was the subject of an NCAA investigation stemming from violations committed during the one-year tenure of former football coach Ron Ponciano. The ordeal concluded June 1, with the NCAA levying three years’ probation against the football program and banning the team from postseason play in 2000.

On other fronts, Dull has taken part in restructuring the Northridge athletic department. A new compliance officer, Darryl Pope, was hired in January, and an assistant athletic director in charge of development, Mindy DeGroot, began in March. Dull also promoted interim football Coach Jeff Kearin to full-time status.

Dull shared his views of the athletic program in a recent conversation.

TIMES: You’ve been on the job for almost one year. What have been the greatest challenges, the biggest problems?

DULL: “It’s probably been the most intense year that I’ve ever gone through. It certainly is a bigger job than what I had imagined. But part of that is because of the specific circumstances of this past year. It has obviously been a year of turmoil and dramatic change. It started with an internal investigation in football which resulted in a coach not being retained and it involved us going through an entire [NCAA] infractions process which was quite time-consuming. I had never been involved in anything like that before. It was also the first time I’ve been involved in changing conferences.”

TIMES: What was your reaction to the sanctions imposed by the NCAA?

DULL: “I think they were fair. They went a little further than I thought they would. I didn’t think we would lose postseason play. Otherwise, it’s what we expected. Overall, it’s an embarrassment. It’s not a proud day in our history and it’s something that can’t be duplicated. We have to look at it in a context that there was a problem and the university needed to do something about it.”

TIMES: Among the biggest changes in the last year was Northridge accepting an invitation to join the Big West Conference in 2001. How will Northridge benefit from the move?

DULL: “It’s going to allow us to save some money, obviously, with travel, about a couple of hundred thousand dollars [a year]. Relative to a $7 million budget, that is a major expense.

“It also gives us an opportunity to define at what level we want to play football and it allows us to begin to attempt to build some more natural rivalries. Some parents will say, ‘Now I will send [my kids to Northridge] because I can now come and see away games as well as home games. Most parents don’t have the wherewithal to go to Montana.

“Those are the things the Big West promises us. We’re in there with like institutions. We’re playing with people from the California State University system, as well as the UC system.”

TIMES: Were you in favor from the start of Northridge leaving the Big Sky for the Big West?

DULL: “Probably the second month I was here I began to wonder, ‘Why are we in the Big Sky?’ What do we have in common with any of those institutions? The geography is just so prohibitive. It always seemed to me that an all-California conference made a lot more sense. Right now, there are still a couple of schools outside of California in the conference, but they’ve made it plain that they’re looking for other homes.”

TIMES: Northridge seems to suffer from an image problem. It’s a “commuter school,” the saying goes, where students come and go and are apathetic about athletics. What can Northridge do to change that?

DULL: “I think that’s been the traditional model of the school, that it doesn’t have a presence in the Valley, but I think that can be different. The institution obviously needs to do a better job than we have in the past in accessing the community and getting out into the community. If you go back and read the newspapers, you would recall that the very first thing I said when I came here is that we needed to build stability and gain our respect back within the campus. We needed to put our own house in order and I think we’ve done that. The next step is to get out in the community.”

TIMES: Fund-raising is an integral part of athletic expansion. Recently, the university received an $80,000 donation from Encino-Tarzana Regional Medical Center. How is fund-raising going?

DULL: “The university is doing better. The donation was the largest, to my knowledge, contribution the institution has ever received for collegiate athletics. When a corporation like Encino-Tarzana Regional Medical Center sees fit to provide a sponsorship, you can play off of that and go out and say [to other corporations]: ‘They’ve done it for $80,000, why don’t you take a look, even if it’s for a lesser amount?’ So, we have that first major gift--and it is a major gift.”

TIMES: How will the athletic department benefit from the donation?

DULL: “It was originally designed to improve our training room, as well as our weight and conditioning room. We’re gutting an old locker room and we’re expanding the strength and conditioning room. The training room will be upgraded to a Division I level, which it is not now. And the strength and conditioning facility will probably be as good as, if not better than, anything in the Big West or the Big Sky. That’s where most of the money will be going.”

TIMES: What other fund-raising efforts are underway?

DULL: “My first charge to Mindy DeGroot is to have a spring campaign where we go out and attempt to add new members to the Matador Athletic Assn. That is her No. 1 priority. Our first focus is to do better with numbers in our annual campaign, in terms of donations to the Matador Athletic Assn. because those moneys are used, from a budgetary standpoint, on a year-to-year basis. Obviously, we want to increase the revenue we receive from corporate sponsorships, and that’s her second immediate goal.

“And she also needs to put together a marketing plan in the fall for football and soccer. Those are the things I’ve asked her to identify in her first four or five months. I have not yet asked her to focus on stadia.”

TIMES: Northridge no longer is faced with a mandate from the Big Sky to build an on-campus football stadium, yet the school insists it will proceed with plans. When will the stadium be built?

DULL: “I still believe we will build it, but the immediacy has been removed. As far as football, we’ve gotten some relief in the short term because we no longer have the mandate from the Big Sky and we do have, through President Louanne Kennedy’s intervention, the opportunity to play in the short term at Pierce College. Now we can sit down and plan exactly what kind of stadium we want. Does it need to be 6,000 seats? Does it need to be 10,000 or 12,000 seats? We need a stadium, obviously, for football as well as men’s and women’s soccer. But we have a little more breathing room now.”

TIMES: What about plans for a new softball stadium? Northridge announced in 1997 it planned to build a $3 million facility, so-called “Field of Dreams.” But construction has yet to begin.

DULL: “There was originally some concern that [estimates were] too high and the university has been scaling down the numbers so that it has been reduced from a $3 million project to about a $2 million project. As soon as the university tidies up and finishes its work refining the final numbers and the final diagram, then I think you’re going to see us go out onto the street and see us raise money for that.

“Capital projects take a long, long time. Not only does construction take a long time, but you’re talking about going out and raising $2 million to $3 million for a project when the most we’ve been raising is $60,000 or $70,000. Anyone who thinks it will be done overnight is [unrealistic]. But it is a project that I think will be successful and we will see it through.”

TIMES: What about other facilities? Matador Field, for instance, could stand considerable improvements.

DULL: “We have committed to put in excess of $200,000 to assist in the baseball facility. You will see some improvements out there. You’re not going to see a new stadium because we’re talking millions of dollars there, but we are going to begin to do some refurbishing and I’m going to let Coach [Mike] Batesole begin to dictate what his wishes are in that regard.

“Baseball is very important to us because we play a lot of baseball games and we play [fewer] football games. But I wouldn’t want to categorize which [facility] is No. 1 right now. But all need to be improved.”

TIMES: And the Matadome?

DULL: “Obviously, it is not a first-class Division I basketball facility. But the fact of the matter is, we have never turned a single soul away when it comes to seating. There is nothing worse than spending millions of dollars on a new arena and have it sit half-empty. That makes no economic sense and it doesn’t make any competitive sense. So, right now the Matadome is what we’re looking at. I do believe we can begin to build out the second deck again with additional seating capacity. We do have an agreement with the kinesiology department and the university, and we do have the option of adding another 800 or 900 seats. That probably would be the next logical step.”

TIMES: Negative publicity has plagued Northridge in recent years because of a variety of misadventures--some the fault of individuals, some the fault of the school. Have we seen the end of those days?

DULL: “Oh, I think that kind of time bomb can go off any time. I would never suggest that intercollegiate athletics, because of its interest in the media, is ever going to be immune from a student-athlete getting into trouble, or a coach or an administrator doing something wrong. What we’re trying to do is put in place, as much as we can, systems that will give us a greater percentage of not having things happen. We just need to be forthright and honest and we don’t need to be engaged in deceit and dishonesty in dealing with our constituents and with the media.”

TIMES: Fast-forward five years. What accomplishments do you expect Northridge to have made by then?

DULL: “I do believe there will be measurable change. I’d like us to have a financial base that makes us a little bit more comfortable. And I’d like us to prioritize sports, and have some of those that are in that first priority playing for national championships--the men’s and women’s basketball teams, other teams like volleyball and both the soccer teams. I don’t expect ever to have 20 national-championship teams here. But what I would like to see for us is a number of them going to the NCAA tournament, because I think that’s what we’re going to be judged by.”